Re: Bug in pg_describe_object

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>> There was never any intention that that code produce a guaranteed-unique
>> identifier; it's only meant to be a humanly useful identifer, and this
>> patch seems to me to mostly add noise.

> Would making the identifier unique do any *harm*?

It would make dependency error messages significantly longer and less
readable.  Quite aside from the point at hand here, we elide schema
names in many cases (and it looks like there are some code paths where
getObjectDescription never bothers to print them at all).  Another issue
that might make it interesting to try to use the output for purposes
other than human-readable descriptions is that we localize all the
phrases involved.

My point is that this isn't a bug fix, it's more like moving the
goalposts on what getObjectDescription is supposed to do.  And I'm not
even very sure where they're being moved to.  I haven't seen a
specification for an intended use of pg_describe_object for which its
existing behavior would be unsatisfactory.
        regards, tom lane